Discrimination

It's all about personality workers and the foreman, if they like
you they'll treat you good. On the other hand, if they don't like
you, they're going to shun you, they're going to make you feel
like an outcast, they can make life pretty bad. --Greg Bowers,
Steelmaker

Although the union song praises "solidarity forever" and the Pennsylvania Steel
Company offered relatively well-paying jobs to recent immigrants, work in the mill was
(and still is) marked by discrimination--according to ethnicity, race, and gender. In
earlier decades, native-born Americans of Anglo-Saxon descent and the Irish would
be foremen, while the less desirable jobs went to the Italians, Croatians, Slovenians,
Hungarians, Serbs, and other immigrants from Eastern Europe. African-Americans,
who worked in the mill from the beginning were given the "dirtiest jobs in steelmaking,"
which were also the most dangerous. Even today there are few African-Americans
who hold the more prized jobs such as crane operators, and only one
African-American is foreman.

"...the Steelton plant was an industrial plant located in an agrarian economy....Central
PA is a very ethnically aware place to llive and the steel mills historically everywhere
used ethnicity to keep workers divided in order to keep the unions out and to limit the
power of the union where they occur. It was perhaps easier to do this in Steelton than
in other places. To give you one example the machine shop at the steel mill was
traditionally staffed by people of English and German descent. And through the sixties
there had not been an Irish or Italian machinist, to say nothing of a Croatian or
Macedonian or heaven...a Mexiacan or black machinist. I mean the level of
stratification and discrimination based on ethnicity is really pervasive and to this day I
think Steelton is one of the most ethnically alert communities that I have ever been in."
Liz Hrenda-Roberts, former steelworker----Class interview

Some women were accepted as co-workers, but most were not. Many male
steelworkers found women workers "a pain in the neck" and complained that women
simply could not do the work adequately. Today the mill has fewer than one hundred
women steelwokers out of a workforce of approximately 1300, and they are scattered
throughout the mill, separated from each other in a predominately male workplace.
[See Sam's paper on consent decree]

Women

Some of the men remembered the times before women worked there:
"There were no women working at the time, and if you were working up high or
something and you had to relieve yourself, you just peed." --Mike Bratina, retired
Steelworker

Women were generally not welcomed or encouraged:"Women? Oh, they're a pain in the neck...they couldn't do this, they couldn't do that.
They couldn't pick this up. You'd get one or two to be as strong as an ox, but the
majority of them, "Oh, I can't do that." "Go help her here, go help her." Do it yourself if
you're going to work there. Do it yourself." --Mike Stubljar, retired Steelworker

"Another thing that I think hurt the Bethlehem Steel Company was the hiring of
females...Females did not, could not do their fair share..." --Joe Inbrognio, retired
Steelworker

But other men were more tolerant toward the opposite sex:
"Towards the end I had women helpers, and they were better than men at times...If the
gal was up to snuff, you had to accept her." --Mike Bratina, retired Steelworker

Of course women steelworkers saw things from a very different perspective:

"I started working in the stell mill in 1974, I had worked pretty much in factories up until
that time...I read in the newspaper that Bethlehem Steel and other steel companies
were ordered to hire women due to a law suit by the NAACP.... I found out that the
court order was for race and sex...they had to have women, so many blacks an dso
many Hispanics in various trades as well as women...because women had been
excluded wholesale....And the company decided that white women would be the
easiest people to deal with and manipulate and the workers would not treat us as
badly as other or whatever. And so they were really heavily recruiting white women for
these apprenticeship jobs....

"I started in the roll shop. Not the bakery, the roll shop is where they turn rolls. Turning
is a way of cutting metal on lathe...it wasn't a particularly hard job, it was dirty and
heavy and all that. But I stayed there for less than a year and they laid me off. And
while I was on lay off an apprenticeship opened at the machine shop and I signed a
bid and won the bid to go into the machine shop....When I went to the machine shop it
was diffferent. There was about 160 workers and half of the guys wouldn't speak to
me at all. They were upset that a woman could do this job and they actually didn't
believe that a woman could or should have this opportunity and thye literally refused to
speak to me or any other women in the apprenticeship. Then there was among the
other half about 20 percent who would be supportive and the rest of them were fairly
neutral--they wouldn't do anything obnoxious but they wouldn't go out of their way to
help us either. And that was the situation that we faced. We had to learn....But it was
an incrediability hostile atmosphere and it was an incredibly racist atmosphere....

"Most of my factory experiences up until this time were in primarily female work places.
And in this work place of course I ended up interacting with a lot of guys. And they
probably wouldn't believe this but I became rather sympathetic to a lot of their
situation. Its hard work, it was hard for me as a woman in a situation where I was
wlecome because of my sex. But it was hard work for all of them too."
Liz Hrenda Roberts, first woman machinist Steelton Plant----class interview